Tamara Dietrich: Gun rights versus fear mongering

Can't give understaffed, overworked state workers a chance to find out if the guy trying to purchase a firearm and ammo is a felon, a fugitive or mentally unbalanced?

Apparently not.

"It is a safety issue," pouts Philip Van Cleave, president of the gun group Virginia Citizens Defense League, in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

"A person experiencing a death threat and who is denied a lawful gun purchase overnight would be left helpless at the hands of an assailant."

Riiight. Hear that noise? That's the one note gun activists sound on any gun issue whatsoever.

It always, always means this: AGH! YOU'RE GONNA DIE!

And it's usually followed by a desperate appeal for your money so they can fight the Big Bad Thing that's about to break down your front door, burn your flag and carry off your gun cabinet.

The newest AGH! that Van Cleave and his ilk find "unacceptable" are budget cuts that slashed 11 people from the 28-person staff at the Virginia Firearms Transaction Center. So now background checks on gun buyers during peak hours could sometimes take anywhere from four hours to if they require checking records out of state overnight.

(Of course, if delays are bad now, imagine how bad they'd be if activists had won a repeal of the one-a-month handgun purchase law last month.)

To gun activists, anything short of drive-thru handgun purchases violates the Second Amendment. If they were merely ideologues, that's one thing. But they bypassed ideology long ago in favor of something far more meaningful: Profit.

And they can monger fear with the best of them, knowing that keeping you scared keeps you writing checks.

Or, as gun advocate and former NRA official Richard Feldman put it in The Washington Post a couple years ago, "Nothing keeps the fund-raising machine whirring more effectively than convincing the faithful that they're a pro-gun David facing down an invincible anti-gun Goliath."

In fact, it's in their interest to engineer threat-downs.

Last year, state lawmakers tried to raise the background check fee from $2 to $5 the first increase in 20 years. That money could have gone a long way to keep background checkers employed.

Instead, gun groups helped kill it.

And so they came off looking like heroes for saving gun buyers $3 but cleverly helped ensure that backgrounders lost their jobs, delays would increase and they'd have yet another reason to rifle through their donors pockets.

Besides, a "safety issue"? Listen, if you're "experiencing a death threat," call the cops. And if a background check will take overnight, well, if you can afford a handgun, you can afford to stay overnight at a Super 8 till it clears.

Finally, want a faster turnaround? Try this: Take some of that cash mountain you raise by stoking fear in gullible hearts and use it to hire more backgrounders.